A Teaching Philosophy

     Beyond the obvious job description of teaching content knowledge, I realize there is a definite underlying role teachers play in constructing how a student views his or her own self, as well as how a student perceives and experiences the world around them. In assuming a critical perspective in examining my lifetime as a student and my limited time as a teacher I have continued to evolve my teaching philosophy.

     My ultimate goal in teaching is to instill a love of learning into each of my students. In order to love learning, one must first be able to learn. Hence, why I am so passionate about literacy and incorporate it into my lesson plans whenever possible. I also believe that while students must learn how to use literacy skills they must be taught how to think. I believe that a teacher must strive to develop within each student, a critical pedagogy: consistent and unconscious habits of thinking, reading, writing, and speaking that go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.

      As students navigate adolescence they construct new knowledge from information and experience through a very limited perspective. Possessing a critical pedagogy motivates students to challenge the limitations of their perspectives and they can ultimately attain critical consciousness: a wider sociopolitical consciousness that allows them to critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequities.

     Ultimately, this is the kind of learning I want my students to love: learning that challenges them with different perspectives and results in the conscious reconstruction of their ‘truths’ and therefore a shrinking of their deficit perspective imposed by their circumstance.  I believe the power in these kinds of learning experiences lies in their possibilities to motivate changes in thinking.